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Boeing's Folding Wingtips Get the FAA Green Light (engadget.com)
Boeing received FAA approval today for its folding wingtips, which will let the planes stop at airport gates big enough to accommodate typical 777 models. "Once the 777X lands, the wingtips will rotate until they point upwards," reports Engadget. "Bloomberg notes that the plane will be the only commercial model in widespread use to have such a feature." From the report: The 777X's wingtips are so novel that U.S. regulators had to draw up new standards for them. The agency was concerned that the wingtips could cause safety issues -- some plane crashes occurred after pilots did not secure flaps on wings before takeoff. The FAA required Boeing to have several warning systems to make sure pilots won't attempt a takeoff before the wingtips are locked in the correct position. The FAA also wanted assurances that there was no way the tips would rotate during flight, and that the wings could handle winds of up to 75 miles per hour while on the ground.
The new wings are made from carbon-fiber composites that are stronger and lighter than the metal Boeing uses in other wings. That lets the company increase the wings' width by 23 feet to 235 feet, which makes flying more efficient. These are the widest wings Boeing has attached to a plane, surpassing the 747-8's 224 feet. However, it doesn't hold the record for a commercial plane: the Airbus A380 has a 262-foot-wide wing, which forced some airports to install gates specifically to accommodate it.
The new wings are made from carbon-fiber composites that are stronger and lighter than the metal Boeing uses in other wings. That lets the company increase the wings' width by 23 feet to 235 feet, which makes flying more efficient. These are the widest wings Boeing has attached to a plane, surpassing the 747-8's 224 feet. However, it doesn't hold the record for a commercial plane: the Airbus A380 has a 262-foot-wide wing, which forced some airports to install gates specifically to accommodate it.
Damm, those are some huge wings :P
a typo is here: "That lets the company increase the wings' width by 23 feet to 235 feet,"
I'm unaware of any accidents involving the folding wings on US Navy aircraft, or at least, not in the last 3 decades. The airlines primarily get their pilots from the military, so having some airline pilots who are already familiar with the checklist step of making sure that the wings are unfolded and locked won't be an enormous training issue.
So, going for the fractions of a percent better than just keeping them fixed vertically as winglets?
I see the bean counters are at work once again.
A penny saved is a penny paid to the bureaucrats who find ways to save money.
Make it so you can't turn the engines on unless the wings are down and locked. Seems like a no-brainer feature.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
The FAA rubber-stamped those measures Friday. (emphasis added)
"Rubber-stamped" is an idiomatic expression meaning roughly "to approve without review," which is not at all how the FAA works.
I know that it is a bit pedantic but I find that more and more people speak and write using phrases that are not appropriate for the context and it makes communication more difficult than it needs to be.
The summary said the FAA "rubber-stamped" the folding wingtips. However, the FAA made Boeing put in several warnings on the planes on whether the tips were in the right place, withstand 75mph winds on the ground, and could not rotate during flight.
Doesn't seem like a "rubber-stamp" to me.
--PM
AI advancements will quickly provide orders of magnitude greater efficiencies to aircraft design and operation than even this amazing and profound tweak to the standard Boeing 777. The sky truly is the limit.
A folding wing option was offered when the 777 was first being developed. No airline wanted to pay for it, so it never happened.
Here is a discussion on why that was, and how the new 777x folding wing differs from the old rejected folding wing plan. The new folding wing section is much smaller and lighter than the old proposal. The old plan required flight controls on the folding section, which the new plan does not.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
No worries, plane will still fly even with the wingtips folded -- it only would be losing about 20% of the wing length. Planes have lost more (on one wing) and landed safely. Takeoff/landing speeds might be a bit faster, though.
Not saying it's recommended, or particularly safe.
https://theaviationist.com/201...
Video of a prototype folding and unfolding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It's actually not that large a section of the wing.
What is your life going to revolve around when Mueller fails to find any sign of anything illegal with the Trump campaign or administration?
and it tore itself apart in flight. Stupid people these are, just like liberal dems always doing stupid things. There is NO COLLUSION. No Collusion.
It shouldn't've been too hard to come up with standards. The Navy flies aircraft with folding wings daily, and we're talking the entire wing folds so the hinge and locking mechanism have to handle the full load of high-G combat maneuvers, I'd imagine the FAA could simply grab the Navy's standards and edit them down to remove the parts only relevant to combat aircraft. That'd cover the wingtip lock status indicator too, all naval folding-wing aircraft have them so the pilot knows if his wings are safe to launch with.
They start the engines after they push the plane away from the gate. There's usually too much stuff near the gate to safely start them up.
The noise you hear when you're at the gate is the APU running. It's *really* loud 'cause it's usually mounted on top of the cabin in the back of the plane. Once they use it to start up the main engines they shut it off and the cabin gets quieter.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
>"Doesn't seem like a "rubber-stamp" to me."
It looks like someone corrected the summary, since "rubber stamped" is not current there...
That's the point. It's an integral kill-switch for the engines. If the wing-lock isn't engaged, you can't run the starter for the engines. There's no breaker or bypass.
Sure a mechanic could probably hot-wire the kill-switch or something. This is what FAA audits are supposed to catch. But at that point you might as well not build planes at all, because all a pilot has to do is ram the yoke forward on takeoff to crash. You can't build a plane completely idiot-proof.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
"That lets the company increase the wings' width by 23 feet to 235 feet, which makes flying more efficient."
Pretty fat wings on this bird! Perhaps 'span' would be a better term.
4wdloop
I've read documentation recently (is there a qualified engineer reading this who has a link to a relevant article?) that showed that biplanes are relevant at the speeds commercial planes like the 777 fly (and even faster). There's a formula that determines the spacing, and how far forward the leading edge of the upper wing is compared to the lower, according to the typical flight speed.
With this technique, the wings could be shorter, yet more efficient (and not need such pricey, exotic materials and techniques for construction). Has anybody done a comparison?
Does the other wingtip get the red light?
Me, I was confused by the wings being "wide".
The word is "wingspan".
Hell, I would've accepted "long". But "wide" is the wrong dimension.
The 777 was the first 2-engine jet airliner to get the FAA approval to cross the ocean. Boeing NEEDED to be able to provide customers with a 2-engine over-ocean bird, and the US govt NEEDS a healthy Boeing, so all that was needed was a fig-leaf of a good argument. An argument that had always failed before (our engines are very reliable and more of anything, including engines, is more chances for failure, plus redundancy is overrated) worked just fine for the 777 approval. The boys at Boeing and the FAA have a friendly regulatory relationship including Beoing employing its own FAA certified regulators who work for Boeing but are federally approved to sign-off on stuff. If Boeing needs something approved and they can make a good argument for it, then you can be sure it will be approved. I'm not saying this is EVIL or even necessarily corrupt in the traditional sense, but it contributes significantly to regulatory capture and the suppression of any upstart competitor.
I'm not attacking the 777; it's a beautiful and safe aircraft - certainly far safer than anything that was flying in the 1960s or 1970s, but that does not mean that the current over-regulation of the industry combined with a chummy relationship for SOME vendors is a good thing for the long run.
At this point, with government regulations in the USA and EU so heavy and fixed-in-bureaucratice-cement, with cross-Atlantic trade policies and diplomatic niceties, and then combined with the USA having really only one airline builder and Europe having only one, there's probably no aircraft that Boeing or Airbus could possibly roll out that would not get approved on both continents, and no chance for a new airline builder to arise on either continent.
If anybody but Boeing or Airbus had APU and/or battery fire issues (as Boeing's early 787s had) or had a main a wing too weak to meet minimum stress test standards (as the A380 initially did) there would be a major engineering anal probing by the regulators. But with these two vital-to-their-governments and too-big-to-fail regional monopoly firms, final approval was always certain with minimal oversight by the regulators.
I'm happy to see that I was not the only person annoyed by the incompetence of the supposedly tech-savvy writer at engadget.
For the uninformed:
The distance from leading edge to trailing edge on an aircrat wing is called "chord"
The distance from wingtip to opposite wingtip on an aircraft is called "span"
The distance from the top surface of a wing to the bottom surface of a wing is measured at the thickest point and is called the "thickness"
There is no dimension of an aircraft wing called "width" and even the laziest writer could look it up in moments thanks to this new-fangled gadget we like to call a "computer" and another astounding thing we call "the internet".
That "wing's width" thing was almost as annoying as all those idiot "journalists" who call EVERY airplane a "jet" and every spacecraft a "shuttle".
I know that it is a bit pedantic but I find that more and more people speak and write using phrases that are not appropriate
I could care less what you find.
I can't tell whether the writer means that incident "X" did not make the landing hazardous,
In the F-15's case that the former :
- The plane has body lift too. Thus there are some safety margins (even with missing bits it can generate enough lift).
- The onboard avionics(*) are able to compensate for quite a lot of situations.
So even with a wing missing, although it couldn't probably perform complex acrobatic maneuvers, could still land safely provided that the pilot is experienced and know how to handle the plane too.
TL;DR: brilliant pilot + bad-ass airplane = can still fly "almost normally" even with missing bits.
Just don't try this it at home, you have drastically reduced quite some safety margins.
---
I've read somewhere that Airbus has some software routine in their avionics that are able to compensate for missing / damamged tail bits. I'll have to track down the reference.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Do the same for the Boeing, but put a little LED right next to it so they won't miss it in the dark.
Not a bad idea but it creates a new issue. Namely how do you tell the indicator is working if the LED malfunctions? Instruments are generally quite reliable but not 100%. That's a fundamental issue with any status indicator - false positives or worse, false negatives. The problem can be with the device or the indicator and it can be difficult to tell which is the problem. The indicators are still worth doing if the failure modes are severe enough but it doesn't completely eliminate the risk.
That means that Slashdot has been hacked, since we know Slashdot editors don't actually edit the summaries - ever.
Maybe that means we'll get Unicode support sometime soon!
I just wish they folded down. Back in the 60's this allowed the plane to get to Mach 3 and beyond!
*** Don't be dull.***
Thanks! I hadn't ever considered this phrase until now and I appreciate knowing that much more about it now.
Still a classic!
Boeing 777 had this feature on at least the first 20 planes . Its a large titanium hinge and was considered one of the largest Ti castings at the time (2000) .One of the problems came from smaller
Airlines did not care for this feature so it was not continued and the early production planes had the hinge locked out
airports having to reinforce the tarmac to accommodate the heavier airframe of the 777 . It was considered a great feature when the 777 was first presented but extra cost and weight seemed to not fit the demand . Looks like there has been a change in the thinking . Let's see if the landing gear begin to dig into the landing strip at the smaller airports (as was suggested by studies ) if they are not upgraded as recommended by Boeing.
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